“What’s unusual about Jim is that he recognized these problems not as a woe-is-me burden but as real growth opportunities, opportunities to change his industry,” says Tim Wirth, president of the United Nations Foundation and a former senator from Colorado..

Interestingly, the one green initiative Rogers says he hopes will emerge most quickly is focused not on generating power but on conserving it...Save-a-Watt thus turns the power business on its head: rather than charge customers more to build plants, Duke will effectively charge them not to do so. “I would rather spend $8 billion implementing efficiency than spend $8 billion on building a nuclear plant,” Rogers told me.

When asked why Rogers ended up taking such a contrary approach to his job, friends point to the fact that he never trained as an engineer — the background of most energy executives

Customers in nuclear states have paid higher electric bills for years, because nuclear power is inherently more expensive to generate, Rowe points out. Duke could have switched to nuclear decades ago but didn’t, so now it must pay the price. [John Rowe es el CEO de Exelon, una empresa con fuerte componente nuclear]